Anthem Religion and Society Series – serie

'Regimes of Happiness' is a comparative and historical analysis of how human societies have articulated and enacted distinctive notions of human fulfillment, determining divergent moral, ethical and religious traditions, and incommensurate and conflicting understanding of the meaning of the ‘good life’. A two-part book, it provides a historical view of the way in which Western societies, the descendants of the Latin Roman Empire, created languages and institutions that established specifi c and occasionally antithetical conceptions of a fulfilled human life or ‘happiness’ in the first part. In the second part, it explores how non-Western societies and non-Christian religions have conceived and established their own ideals of human perfection. 'Regimes of Happiness' is a critical reflection on modern notions of happiness which are typically focused on individual feelings of pleasure.

This book studies the interplay of economic philosophy and moral conduct as reflected in the writings of one of the most renowned scholars in Islamic history, Abū Ḥāmid Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad al-Ghazālī (d. 1111). As is well known, Imām al-Ghazālī, nicknamed “the proof of Islam”, contributed immensely to Islamic theology, philosophy, and Sufism or Islamic mysticism (taṣawwuf). Strikingly enough, al-Ghazālī also made seminal contributions to the field of economic thought, but this contribution has been largely neglected, although al-Ghazālī dedicated many chapters to what he considered just and Sharī‘a-based economic conduct in (Muslim) society. This book aims to analyse and revive al-Ghazālī’s understudied contribution to economic thought by emphasizing his economic philosophy and its correlation between Sharī‘a’s moral law and the tradition of taṣawwuf, as well as to situate his thought within the context of modern economic theories.

For those captive to the broken world of late modernity, wherein ageing and dying persons become vulnerable to despair, this book offers a diagnostic of such despair. It also resources the practices of a realistic, humanising hope that might enable a strength for person to journey with and for others, together, through such despair. Thus, by addressing the aetiology of despair experienced by people confronting ageing, frailty and dying, and drawing upon the writings of Gabriel Marcel, among others, Ashley Moyse reveals the problematic life of a broken world with its functionalising metaphors, instrumentalising reasoning and objectifying desires that offer no hope at all. It is a broken world where despair generates behaviours that anticipate suicide or other, often tragic, outcomes that impede or greatly curtail or even completely inhibit human flourishing. Resisting despair, but living through it, Moyse presents the activity of the moral life, demonstrating a way persons might be resourced through an intersubjective and reflective pedagogy, with its habits or practices that enable a humanising hope, liberating human beings to become those readied to confront the actualities of human living and dying, and encouraged to grow and develop as ‘wayfarers’, hopefully.

Genealogies of the West presents a new look at the West by tracing the still-recognizable footprints of the past and reflecting on the present challenges it faces. Through a review of its rich and often controversial history, it recalls the genealogies of the plural processes, ideas, characters, and events that structure the West’s tradition and identity, and their presence nowadays. It shows the faces of the Modernity and its most relevant achievements—such as the state, capitalism, science, technology, ideologies, and enlightenments—and how they are being revised nowadays by postmodernity. This helps readers gain perspective, gives clues for understanding the complexities of the past, challenges some pre-assumed historical inaccuracies, identifies its weight and presence in the present, and projects these thoughts toward the future.

This book studies the interplay of economic philosophy and moral conduct as reflected in the writings of one of the most renowned scholars in Islamic history, Abū Ḥāmid Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad al-Ghazālī (d. 1111). As is well known, Imām al-Ghazālī, nicknamed “the proof of Islam”, contributed immensely to Islamic theology, philosophy, and Sufism or Islamic mysticism (taṣawwuf). Strikingly enough, al-Ghazālī also made seminal contributions to the field of economic thought, but this contribution has been largely neglected, although al-Ghazālī dedicated many chapters to what he considered just and Sharī‘a-based economic conduct in (Muslim) society. This book aims to analyse and revive al-Ghazālī’s understudied contribution to economic thought by emphasizing his economic philosophy and its correlation between Sharī‘a’s moral law and the tradition of taṣawwuf, as well as to situate his thought within the context of modern economic theories.

Ever since Godwin announced to the world in Memoirs that Wollstonecraft had had little use for religion, most biographers, scholars, historians and readers have regarded her as an apostate. Further, the existing scholarly texts fail to demonstrate the pervasiveness of biblical references in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. The true tally of scriptural references approaches over 1,100 as identified in this study. Wollstonecraft’s biblical allusions, besides sheer volume, are noteworthy because they gave women a biblical basis upon which to contend for better education and occupational opportunities as well as for legal and political independence. That the arguments were couched in biblical rhetoric most likely contributed to their initial reception and tolerance of what were incendiary ideas and searing social criticism. The recognition and analysis of biblical underpinnings in Wollstonecraft and Religion not only of Rights of Woman but also of her other publications and letters propose new consideration regarding the Mother of Feminism and her work. The chapters that accompany the annotated text of Rights of Woman furnish biographical and historical context that offer fresh perspectives about Wollstonecraft’s religious convictions and faith, many of which have not been published elsewhere.

This book, a guide to studying religion, has two parts. The first or historical part traces the rise of the academic study of religion from the early nineteenth century to the present day. Primary attention is given to the relation of studying religion to Romanticism and to its contrary relations to principal characteristics of Western modernity, especially its rational and materialist emphases. The second part of the book addresses matters that present uncertainties, problems, and even tensions within the field, such as, what is or should be meant by referring to some persons or groups as religious, why religion is so often a cause of tensions and even conflicts both within and between religious groups and between them and the increasingly nonreligious or secular quality of modern Western culture, and the problem that arises for the field by reason of scholars who, on one side, are themselves religious and who, on the other side, are nonreligious or secular. The book places this final difficulty, the difference and often the tension between religious and nonreligious approaches to the study of religion, in the role of a unifying theme of the book and offers a way by which this problem can be addressed and to a considerable degree reduced.